Often it’s not! Opinion polls range in what the distributions look like, and it’s hard to measure quantitatively. But bi-modal distributions are not unusual either.
Whatever you say you are or defend when you are powerless is meaningless. Is what you do when you have power what has a real meaning.
It seems liberals describe themselves in some really cool propaganda. But when they take power, they use power to perpetuate their power. They start wars. They suppress different opinions with force.
I read the definition of liberalism in USA, and I like what I see. But I don’t like when liberalism is another ideology to support “the ends justify the means”.
I am not politogician so I don’t know if can produce examples that would be valid for you. And I don’t want to distract my arguments with bad examples. Yea, I am very bad at this talking in public on the internet thing.
The latter i think. In the US is that there has developed a schism in political reality between conservatives/Republicans, who consume different media than the rest of the county, and liberals, such that there are now two “Overton Windows” with little overlap.
Moderation is usually about finding a compromise position between two political extremes. Today there is little desire to moderate or find a middle ground. Just a week ago in Texas the state sued and won a Supreme Court case against the cities of Laredo and Austin to prevent them from enforcing a ban on plastic grocery bags. If the cities continue to discourage their use or ask businesses to use their own discretion i wouldn’t at all be surprised to see the state pass laws forcing businesses to carry them, just so they can “stick it to the liberals”. We know that many of our posters here see Trumpism not as some sliding scale between liberal and conservative but literally a life-or-death issue against them. It’s hard to see what a moderate position would be there.
Increasingly there seems nowhere a “moderate” can live because the choices are binary and mutually exclusive.
The label “moderate” seem more to appeal today who support and have benefited from the status quo, imo, rather than out of a strong sense of ideological principle. The Third Way Democratic PAC has been trying to bring back to life the neo-liberal politics of the 90s embodied by Clinton and Blair as a kind of compromise “moderate” liberalism. But this take on things seems to be falling on deaf ears, at least at the moment.
Teiman you sound like you are coming at this from an outside-the-USA perspective. Inside the US there is a very big difference between conservative and liberal, and 5 of the 13 examples you listed initiated by liberal Presidents while 8 were initiated by conservative Presidents. All of the examples in the last 37 years were initiated by conservative Presidents. You also left out the most egregious example of all, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was also initiated by a conservative President and specifically opposed by most rank and file liberals.
Are you looking at the US in general as “liberal democracy” and lumping both Democrats and Republicans together? That’s the only way your argument would make sense, and from an internal US perspective you cannot lump the two parties together.
As one might guess from the other thread I think that 5 - 10% should be moved into a weak Trump/Fox category holding it’s nose and voting Trump on the basis of group identity as Republicans
That’s fair. The truly zealous hardcore Trump/Limbaugh types are probably only 30 to 35% of the electorate. However, I do think holding your nose and voting for Trump, well that’s a pretty big nose, if you know what I’m sayin’
That’s just noise. Fox News and the GOP has pretty much inoculated all their viewers against the idea of voting for any democratic candidate. Hell, look what the GOP did to Kerry in 2004, when he had very little of the baggage that Clinton had.
I think there was a group that stayed home, rather than vote for Hillary, but I don’t believe there was an Anti-Hillary Voter as much as there is an Anti-Democrat voter.